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Editorial: Cost and severity of natural disasters is mounting

A lesson from the Calgary flood is that we need to take mitigation measures seriously.

The mountain pine beetle, enabled by milder winters, has now infested $4.2-billion worth of timber across British Columbia.

Photograph by: Handout
, Vancouver Sun

Cautious scientists observe that one event cannot be definitive proof of a trend and that coincidence is not evidence of causality — the so-called smoking gun so often demanded or presented by conspiracy theorists of various stripes — yet a sequence of events certainly lends the indisputable weight of probability to the possibility that a trend may be developing.

So, while citing the recent devastating floods in Calgary as evidence of global warming remains in the realm of conjecture and opinion, its context is clearly embedded in a compelling sequence of catastrophic flooding events around the world. This context strengthens the credibility of climate change models which consistently predict increased frequency for extreme weather as a consequence of rising planetary temperatures which inject more energy into atmospheric systems.

Similar floods have in the last decade wreaked havoc in Australia, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Central America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific. A quick survey of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration database compiling extreme weather events worldwide shows a clear trend of increasing frequency. There were four such events in 2004, for example, then six the following year, eight the year after that, then 10, then 20 in 2008. There were 15 events in 2009, then 17, then 19 in 2011. We got a respite in 2012 when they fell back to four. But the five-year average has increased from seven per year to 15 per year.

To date, 144 weather and climate-related disasters — including droughts, blizzards and storms as well as floods — have cost the U.S. economy more than $1 trillion since 1980.

Thus, Germany is able to absorb the estimated $16 billion cost of recent floods relatively easily but Greece is threatened with serious fiscal instability as a result of flash floods in Athens.

And a discussion paper produced by the Swiss Reinsurance Company in collaboration with the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction in 2010 finds similar trends for flooding events in Canada.

If those models prove accurate in predicting trends, then we may expect more floods of the kind that recently traumatized one of Canada’s most advanced cities and more firestorms like the one causing such tragedy in Arizona, where an entire elite firefighting crew was killed.

This means we can also expect deeper cold spells, hotter heat waves, heavier precipitation events in the form of snow and rain, prolonged droughts, more intense storms, much less predictable seasonal weather patterns and all the headaches for agriculture, forestry, fisheries, transportation and domestic life — financial and otherwise — that come with them.

Wildfires, for example, have cost B.C. more than $1.7 billion over the past decade. The mountain pine beetle, enabled by milder winters, has now infested $4.2-billion worth of timber across the province. An unprecedented coast-to-coast drought in 2001-02 caused Canada’s GDP to fall by $5.8 billion and 41,000 jobs were lost.

Calgary’s cost in terms of infrastructure and other physical damage from the flooding is currently estimated at $256 million but is expected to eventually total somewhere closer to $1 billion. Floods in Manitoba in 2011 pushed that province’s budget into a near $1-billion deficit — with costs associated with the disaster expected to total about $815 million. And, of course, there are the less tangible costs of lost productivity, foregone revenue from interrupted commerce, tourism losses during the event, public psychological stress and so on.

As The Vancouver Sun pointed out in June of 2007 when a heavier than normal winter snowpack and a sudden hot spell put the Fraser River perilously close to overflowing, significant portions of the Fraser Valley remain vulnerable to a catastrophic flood, a system of protective dikes notwithstanding. Then there was another moment in 2012 when the river rose more than six metres and crested close enough to the top of dikes to once again worry disaster experts. Only four times in the past century has the river crested above seven metres — 99 years ago it reached eight metres and flooded a vast expanse of the valley — and three of those events have occurred since 1948.

The Swiss Reinsurance study notes that unlike 1894, more than 300,000 people now live and work in the flood plain along with extensive railway, airport, dock and highway infrastructure. A simultaneous combination of extreme winter snowfall, a severe rain event and a sudden hot spell might conceivably create conditions that in the future could overwhelm present dyking structures intended to mitigate potential flooding. And that would, indeed, be a catastrophic financial event for Metro and the province.

The study estimates, for example, that while the infamous 1948 flood was smaller in magnitude than the 1894 event, it caused far more damage (close to $200 million in 2009 dollars) because development was more extensive.

Today, with even more extensive development, the cost of a similar inundation of the Fraser River floodplain — or possibly worse, given the trend for extreme weather — might reach $10 billion for a one-in-500-year event. This would amount to just under one-quarter of all the provincial government’s spending projected for 2013.

Clearly, if there are lessons to be learned from Calgary, they are that while previous development on floodplains cannot be undone, comprehensive strategic climate-related disaster mitigation and response planning on a regional, provincial and national scale is both prudent and wise.

Debate over climate change and what could or should be done in response is important and deserves to be taken seriously, not mocked, dismissed or ignored by any faction. But equally important is awareness of the unassailable reality of that change, what its consequences can be and what can pragmatically be done to mitigate the financial burdens taxpayers everywhere must inevitably face if the process deepens and accelerates as it certainly appears to be doing.

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